She Tripled Her Income By Doing This

🏝 Travel blogger Lauren Juliff is featured in a recent BBC article: The workers quitting digital nomadism…

In 2011, Lauren Juliff quit her job at a supermarket in the UK to see the world. She launched a travel website aiming to fund her adventures. To her surprise, she started making enough within a year to be a digital nomad. 

“For me, I loved the travel. My dream was always to see as much of the world as possible, so once I made that dream a reality, I was determined to never let it go. Exploring new countries made me feel alive and I learned so much – about new cultures and myself – on a near-daily basis.”

But after five years…

the excitement of the nomadic lifestyle across the world began to ebb. Juliff, now 34, describes her journey – initially idyllic and dream-like – morphing into an exhausting ordeal she was desperate to escape.

Living and working on the move had unintended repercussions on her mental and physical health. “I began to have panic attacks on a daily basis – ones that only stopped whenever I imagined having a home,” she says. The absence of a stable community resulted in a loss of long-term friendships, leading to feelings of loneliness and depression. Juliff’s health suffered as she experienced food poisoning and infections frequently.

🇵🇹 Then Lauren found a home base…

Upon settling down in Portugal and signing a lease on an apartment, Juliff saw her income triple within a year. She credits the improvement to the consistency of being in one place and not traveling constantly. Her panic attacks vanished, she joined a gym, started cooking healthy meals and built a solid community of friends.

Lauren’s travel blog is Never Ending Footsteps.

Soon after she moved to Portugal, she reported in an interview that she was earning “typically between $5,000 and $7,000 a month,” mostly from affiliate marketing.

Elsewhere she says she started earning six figures a year around this time 💰

It’s worth noting however that Lauren hasn’t stopped traveling.

The travel schedule currently posted on the sidebar of her website…

April: Australia
May: South Korea
June: England
July: Ireland
August: Mauritius

But she wrote in 2021 that having a home base is big for her…

I stopped travelling full-time back in 2016, when I moved to Portugal, and I’ve maintained a home base ever since… I’m planning on moving to Melbourne in September of this year and to be quite honest, I’m hoping it’ll be my forever home.

I had a similar experience to Lauren.

I quit my day job in 2010 to start traveling the world and working online.

(See some of the many highlights from my travels in this 5-minute video)…

I earned enough via freelancing to travel indefinitely, but after a few years I started to crave more of a home base.

The final straw was Bali 🇮🇩

Cool place to visit. But it was tough trying to build a serious business from there. And in 11 months I got seriously ill twice, hospitalized once (dengue).

I haven’t traveled much since then. And my life has improved significantly in many areas, including financially 📈

In conclusion: being a digital nomad is awesome, but there are some heavy trade-offs.